Flying Mammals Driving West Side Residents Batty

Gov. Gary Locke may be the most prominent Washington resident to play host to bats this year, but he certainly isn’t alone.

Pest-control businesses and health officials are seeing a sharp increase in bats reported in homes and in the number of people seeking rabies vaccinations.

State officials say 30 rabies-infected bats have been found in the state this year, more than twice the typical annual total. But more than 300 bats have been tested - almost five times the number commonly tested in a full year.

No humans have been stricken with rabies since a 65-year-old Shelton man died in January. He and a 4-year-old Centralia girl, who died in early 1995, are the only two Washington residents known to have contracted rabies since 1939.

A question puzzling health workers and pest-control operators is this: Are there really more bats around, or are just more people noticing them?

One theory is that this soggy spring produced a bumper crop of bugs that bats eat, allowing more young bats to survive.

Another is that development spreading farther into rural areas puts more homes closer to wildlife habitat.

Both may have merit, but experts say nothing puts bats on the map as much as the news coverage of the first family’s bat-driven evacuation from the governor’s mansion in June.

“When the governor had his problems, that’s when we started getting a lot of calls,” said Doug Oliveira, manager of an extermination company in Seattle.

Locke and his wife, Mona, and their baby, Emily, were vaccinated against rabies in April after a bat swooped through a second-floor bedroom. But when four more bats were captured in the mansion, the family moved out until workers could get rid of any other bats and patch the holes the bats used for access.

Contrary to their negative image in Dracula movies, bats are almost always benign and are, themselves, efficient pest exterminators, eating up to 600 mosquitoes an hour.

Even so, an encounter with the flying mammals can be unsettling. Just ask the Seattle attorney who was bumped on the head by a bat after her son’s 4 a.m. feeding.

“At first, I thought it was a bird the cat brought in,” said attorney Jenny Durkan, grazed by a bat in her Mount Baker-area home. But as it swooped from room to room, she saw it was a bat with about a 12-inch wingspan.

Durkan shooed the bat out a door, but later wished she had caught it so it could have been tested for rabies. In the wild, only about one bat in 200 carries the rabies virus, but the rate runs higher among bats brought in for testing because healthy bats are more likely to avoid humans.